From the title of this book and the colorful dust cover, prospective readers may expect it will deal with matters such as bacteria and tapeworms.

These do get some mention, but “The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today” mostly deals with encounters among humans and other species — fire ants, woolly mammoths, Indian tigers, pronghorns, aurochsen — and how the writer, biologist Rob Dunn, feels about the results.

At least as interesting, and more controversial, he treats humans as just another species striving for survival. The reader can look at his watch, think of history books and take some satisfaction knowing we’ve succeeded — so far. Makes you think, and entertains you, too.

Some of those ants seem better organized than humans, and some of those prehistoric cave paintings of aurochsen are as fascinating as what you see in museums.

Never heard of aurochsen? They were the ancestors, now extinct, of today’s cattle. Dunn sees the co-development of cattle and humans as so important that it dominates a section of the book, under the title “How We Tried to Tame Cows (and Crops) but Instead They Tamed Us and Why It Made Some of Us Fat.”

The story begins about 9,000 years ago, when aurochsen began to move into human settlements, thriving on grasses that grew in areas that humans had cleared. Humans cannot digest grass the way aurochsen can, and many adults couldn’t digest milk, either. But some grass seeds — today’s grains — became staples. Those humans who were able to digest milk tended to survive and produce offspring while those who couldn’t died off, producing fewer children with the same weakness.

“By some estimates,” the book says, “75 percent of all the food consumed in the world (now) comes from just six plants and one animal. If cows went extinct tomorrow, millions of humans would die, just as would happen with wheat or corn and once did happen with the blight of potatoes” — an allusion to the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, which heavily reduced the island’s population.

“Cows may look at us with mopey-eyed stares, but we are partners.”

Humans outnumber cows in the world, he points out, but they outweigh us. So, “depending on how you count, it is ambiguous whether they or we have had, in our coming together, more success.”

The book ends with some unconventional proposals of scientists in response to predictions of world overpopulation and food shortages later in the 21st century.

How about advancing from green rooftops to 30-story buildings designed as farms producing food — on the inside? Or imitating some of our not-so-remote ancestors by developing cities and farms in cliffs and caves?

nonfiction

Title: “The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today”Author: Rob DunnPublisher: HarperCollinsPrice: $26.99; Pages: 304